Give Hospitals The Right To Bare Arms

When Prime Minister Gordon Brown addressed the Labour Party last month, he promised the cheering crowd that all hospitals would be "deep cleaned" to rid them of superbugs such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), which are killing an estimated eight thousand hospital patients yearly.

He also ordered doctors in the British National Health Service to replace their long-sleeved lab coats with freshly laundered short-sleeved or sleeveless scrubs to curb the spread of germs from patient to patient.

New data in the Oct. 17 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association show that MRSA infections are killing about twice as many people in the U.S. as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention previously estimated. The new MRSA data are based on actual laboratory results rather than on what hospitals tell the CDC, admit to families, or report on death certificates.

If the same methodology were applied to quantify deaths from all hospital infections (not just MRSA), the U.S. death toll would be substantially larger than the current CDC estimate of 100,000 a year. How much larger is still unclear, but how many must die to get the attention of U.S. politicians?

First of all, why is the job of politicians to force doctors and nurses to wash their hands? The hospital admins and the HMO execs should be policing hospitals by reading hospitals’ morbidity/mortality reports.

Second, here’s more info about the author of this article, Betsy McCaughey (an ex-politician) from http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=04&year=2007&base_name=post_3322 :

“But is this Betsy McCaughey the “Elizabeth McCaughey” who as a fellow at the Manhattan Institute wrote the legendary article, “No Exit,” in The New Republic in 1993, in which she claimed to have read the entire Clinton health care plan and adduced all sorts of nightmare scenarios? Is this Betsy McCaughey the “Betsy McCaughey Ross” who, solely on the credential of having discredited the Clinton health care plan, was chosen as the Republican nominee for Lieutenant Governor of New York in 1995, becoming probably the first person ever to make news from that position by, for reasons never explained, standing up for the entirety of Governor Pataki’s 1997 State of the State address? The same Betsy McCaughey who then became a Democrat, ran for governor, and divorced and sued her husband, Wilbur Ross, when he refused to bankroll her campaign?”

“Yes, all the same person. And her new gig, the “Committe to Reduce Infection Deaths”? A good cause, to be sure: make sure doctors wash their hands. But the actual activities are vague and the “committee” itself consists of folks like Erica Jong, Tina Brown, Sir Harold Evans, the architect Richard Meier, and various other New York socialites.”

I’m not sure that a “deep-cleaning” would make a lot of difference, since MRSA rides in to the hospital on PEOPLE that are colonized with it. It’s not really a question of dirt, though dirty environs don’t help. The biggest problem, day in and day out, is that the hospital personnel DONT WASH THEIR HANDS BETWEEN PATIENTS! And it’s not just the workers, but the physicians as well ( in fact more commonly!)
I’ve spent a few shifts where I was “extra” actually noting this and counting how often the workers don’t either wash their hands or use hand sanitizers. The hospital I work for is the “nicer” hospital in town, and the rate of non-washing was between 60 and 70%. No joke. Really. This also didnt vary much between critical care, surgical, and medical units of the hospital.

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